Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The
kind of intolerance that is prevalent in the society today, makes me wonder the
direction that we are heading towards, progressive or regressive? There is a
growing intolerance to views which do not confirm with a certain segment of the
society. The intolerance takes to violent recourse to ensure that the dissident
voice is stifled, at times quite harshly, ensuring that the voice is done for
ever and an example is set for a long time to come.

Were
we an intolerant society since time immemorial or is this regressive
intolerance a recent phenomenon? Are we emulating what we have inherited or are
we creating new means to enforce and ensure a particular way of thought? Is
anti-religious views anathema to a society which has a long and a diverse
religious tradition?

Sometimes
it’s worth looking at our past for many of our present day problems. Many might
say that atheism and such thoughts are a recent phenomenon, as the ancient man
was always god-fearing and had faith in god. There is as much truth in that as there
is in the statement that the month of January has 38 days!

History
is witness to the philosophies like Charvaka of the Nastikavada, i.e. the
philosophy of atheism. Charvaka philosophy believed in the theory of
materialism being prime and preached religious indifference. The philosophy
challenged the existing notions, “There is no heaven, no ultimate salvation. No
soul exists in the next world, nor are the actions of the four varnas fructuous in any way. .......If
the animal sacrificed in the jyotishtom
yagna goes to the heavens, why does one not sacrifice his own father?...”
(as mentioned in Sarva Dharma Sangraha by
the 14th century philosopher Madhava Acharya). It denied all the
doctrines of the major religions of the day and believed in indulgence of
sensory pleasures, as the sole objective of any life.

While
the objective here is not to subscribe to the said theory and elevate it to a
higher level; this is just to prove, that there were proponents of such theories
who believed that the Vedas were tainted with untruth and self-contradictions.
However, none stoned the proponents and nor were their works burnt and banned. This
brings me to an excellent example of tolerance of divergence or even
anti-religious views as seen in the epic Ramayana.

Jabali
was a sage in the court of Dasharath, the King of Ayodhya. Jabali was an
atheist and did not believe in any of the religious texts or rituals. His
anti-religious views often made him ridicule the established rituals prevalent
in the society then. On one of the occasions, he was supposed to have made fun
of the post-death rituals by saying, that offering food to the dead, during the
period of shradha was a sheer waste
of food; whoever had heard that dead people could eat! He even went on to say,
that the scriptures that contained the rituals for worshipping gods and the yagnas and other such rituals were
prescribed by wise men only to keep people subjugated in the name of religion.

It
is interesting to note as to what someone with such allegedly ‘devious’ thought
process, was doing in the court of the great King Dasharath. Dasharath was of
the opinion, that there were all sorts of people in his kingdom and if there
was anything to do with such people, then Jabali would be the right person to
understand them and help mete out justice to such people, since there was every
possibility of the others condemning them even before their trial, due to their
initial disposition towards religion. Truly, a broad-minded outlook given the
times.

This
further gets reinforced, during an episode in the epic Ramayana. When all who
had gone with Bharat to persuade Rama to return to Ayodhya had failed, Jabali
was supposed to have tried to convince Rama in his own inimitable way. He is
supposed to have told Rama, that he was taking his father’s wishes a bit too
far and as a designated King of Ayodhya he had every right to ascend the throne
and enjoy the fruits of royalty. Man was born alone and died alone, and clinging
to such parental emotions was man’s undoing. Just to honour some wish of his
dying father, his leaving the comforts of a palace for forests, was nothing
short of foolishness and it would be sensible to return to Ayodhya. Jabali felt
rather strange that a man of Ram’s stature should leave a concrete objective
like ruling the kingdom of Ayodhya, for some obscure religious norm that he
wanted to honour.

Needless
to say, that Ram was angry and wondered how his father had kept such a person
as his advisor. What follows is a dialogue where Ram justifies his actions, and
during the course of what seems to be a reprimand of sorts, calls him an
atheist. Jabali is said to have withdrawn and ended the entreaty to return,
with the words that based on the circumstances, he changed his belief system to
suit the occasion. When needed he became a believer and when required he became
a non-believer. While these words were seen as the words of an opportunist, we
will debate this a little later. Having said what he did, Jabali was supposed
to have withdrawn and went back to Ayodhya like the others, except that after
the death of Dasharath, and during the exile of Rama, he was seen as an
outcast, and he was supposed to have left Ayodhya.

Many
like Dr. Pradip Bhattacharya have referred to Jabali as a ‘Freethinker par
excellence’, while many have seen him as a rank atheist and taken Ram’s
reproach and reprimand as the final word against atheism. Many have gone to
suggest that Jabali made those radical statements only to coax Ram to return to
Ayodhya and he didn’t quite mean the words he used, and the final words were an
indication to that. However, the final words that he changed his views based on
circumstances, had more to do with the typical dilemma, a lot of us have in
mind. Did god really exist? Some aspects denote the presence of a Supreme
power, but some incidents make us question the very presence of such power,
which seems benign at certain times. The statement was a case of dilemma which
is what majority of the people suffer, when they are not so stubborn or dogged
in their views about matters of God, and have an iota of grey matter to ask
questions and not give in to blind belief system. The statement is apt when a
simpleton does not get answers to his questions, and gives in to moments of
weakness or frustration.

Jabali
went on to write the Jabali Upanishad
and the modern city of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, India, is supposed to have
been named after him. The origins of Jabali too make interesting reading.

According
to Samaveda-Chandogyopanishad, once
a sage came across a boy who had an intense desire to learn, but none were
willing to accept him as a disciple. The sage asked the boy his name and he
said, Satyakama. After this the sage asked the obvious question, about his
father, to understand his caste and if he deserved education. To this Satyakama
is supposed to have said, that he didn’t know the name of his father, but his
mother had asked him to say, if asked, that he was the son of Jabala, which was
her name. Not knowing the name of one’s father, meant questionable paternity
and also put his mother’s reputation in question. But the sage could not
overlook Satyakama’s intense desire to learn, and much to the displeasure of
the others, the sage accepted Satyakama as his disciple who was since then also
referred to as Jabali, the son of Jabala.

To
conclude, I would urge the upholders of religion, that any religion stands by
its own strength and does not need pillars to uphold it. Religion should be
able to protect its followers and not the other way round. A fragile religion
is a sign of weakness and any efforts to ‘save’ it would only prove
counter-productive. Divergent views give way to debate and debates are a must
for the thoughts to flower and find new meanings. Don’t thwart this growth and
when the vision is faint, look back. Even Rama was sympathetic to the likes of
Jabali, just who are you guys, if I may ask?

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Front panel of sarcophagus with a myth of Aphrodite and Adonis.Parian marble. Late 2nd century A.D., Mantua, Ducal Palace.

The Greek myth of Aphrodite and Adonis is
an interesting myth of love, lust and rejection, peppered with revenge and
jealousy. It’s a classic love saga with layers of symbolism. Let us first understand
the birth of the main characters in the myth.

Aphrodite was born from the place where the
genitals of Cronos were thrown after he was castrated by his son, Zeus. In art,
Aphrodite is generally shown as a beautiful young woman standing on a scallop
shell. Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of beauty, love and carnal pleasures.
Though she was married to Hephaestus, she was known to be having affairs with
many other gods, Ares, the god of war being one of them (Read “Aphrodite’s Infidelity” http://utkarshspeak.blogspot.in/2013/05/aphrodites-infidelity.html
) and mortals like Adonis amongst others.

Aphrodite

The birth of Adonis is a bit scandalous and
different. It has many variations, but let’s refer to the most common version
here. Adonis’s mother was the beautiful Myrrha, the daughter of King Cinyras.
Myrrha’s mother would boast that Myrrha was the most beautiful of all and that
her beauty surpassed that of even Aphrodite. This angered Aphrodite and she cursed
Myrrha to fall in love with her own father, King Cinyras. Accordingly, Myrrha
fell in love with her father, and without knowing what was at play, one night
in the cover of darkness, Myrrha managed to seduce her father to sleep with her,
after getting him drunk.

When the father discovered that he was
tricked by his own daughter and that she was expecting his child, he chased her
with a sword to kill her. The

Myrrh Tree

gods however took pity on the girl and changed
her into a tree, better known as the myrrh tree, a tree which produces resin.
Later, the goddess of birth enabled her to deliver a baby and Adonis, the baby
was found near the myrrh tree. Aphrodite took pity on the baby and gave it to
Persephone, the wife of Hades, the god of the underworld, managing to hide the
baby from others, as it was a sinful birth out of incestuous relationship. Adonis
was a child whose mother was also his sister and whose father was also his
grandfather!

Baby Adonis grew up to be a very handsome
man,

which made both Persephone and Aphrodite fall in love with him! Soon a
fight broke up between the two as to who should keep the handsome young man.
Zeus had to intervene, and it was decided that Adonis would spend one third of
the year with Persephone, one third with Aphrodite and the remaining would be
left on Adonis to decide. Adonis decided to spend the rest with Aphrodite, as
he preferred to be on earth. However, Aphrodite was still not happy with the
arrangement, as she wanted Adonis completely to herself. It is said that Aphrodite
had seduced Adonis, into lazing around when at Hades, and enjoying him for the
rest of the year, leaving Persephone fuming.

Venus and Adonis, 1794, Antonio Canova (1757-1822), *

Soon Adonis started spending more time with
Aphrodite, however, popular versions say, that he wasn't quite in love with
Aphrodite. Adonis loved hunting instead. Aphrodite had a premonition of hunting
leading Adonis to some trouble. She kept warning him against hunting. She had an
uncanny fear that some animal would want to take revenge on her by harming
Adonis, especially lions, as she had cursed two lovers to become lions since
she was upset with them over something (which is another story). To further
dissuade him, she had warned not to challenge animals which charged back or
came back at him, or were not scared of him.

Once, when Aphrodite left for some place,
Adonis

The Death of Adonis, by Giuseppe Mazzuoli, 1709 (Hermitage Museum)

charged into the forest for hunting. Soon he came across a wild boar,
which had long tusks and started to chase it. The boar surprisingly could not
be scared away and the hunt changed sides. The boar ended up chasing Adonis,
and before long the boar plunged its tusks deep into his groin and killed him.
Later it was found that the boar was no ordinary boar, but Ares, one of the
lovers of Aphrodite, who was jealous of Adonis for taking so much of Aphrodite’s,
attention and affection. Some versions say that it was Persephone, who had told
Ares about the relationship, as she was jealous of Aphrodite! In a severely
wounded state Adonis called out for Aphrodite, who turned back to the forest to
find Adonis breathing his last.

The place where the drops of Adonis’s blood
fell,

gave birth to beautiful red anemones, a flower found during the spring in
the Mediterranean, and the rest of the blood flowed into a river, which today
flows as the river Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon, also known as the Adonis River.

Adonis, after his death went to the
underworld, where he was greeted by Persephone. The very idea of Adonis being
in the company of Persephone forever, made Aphrodite uneasy and she landed at
the doors of the underworld, leading to another confrontation. Once again Zeus,
had to intervene, and it was resolved that Adonis would now spend half year
with each of them.

As mentioned earlier, the myth has layers
of meaning. The story symbolises many things.

Adonis’s six month term can be seen in two
ways. The first one is symbolic of man’s spending half his life with his mother
and the other with his wife, the former being symbolised by Adonis being
brought up by Persephone and the latter by Adonis spending his youth with
Aphrodite. The other symbolism is the change in seasons. When Adonis spent time
with Persephone, it was winter and when he came back to Aphrodite, he brought
with him spring and summer, a time for love and romance, his relationship with
Aphrodite. The struggle for Adonis was the perennial struggle for love (as
life) and death. An important aspect of the myth was the death and resurrection
of Adonis, which represented the perishing and the revival of the plants
annually.

Adonis was the symbol of masculinity and
good looks. Adonis, though born out of an incestuous relationship, which was out
of jealousy of Aphrodite, ensured that Aphrodite, who brought disgrace to his
mother, did not find love herself. Aphrodite was known for having many lovers, but
never loved her own husband. Though she loved Adonis, Adonis loved hunting. The
anemone flowers are a reminder to Aphrodite’s frustrated love. It is said, that
the flowers, have a short span of life. No sooner they bloom, the wind pulls them
down, as the flowers have weak and slender stems and cannot withstand slightest
of the breeze!

The theme of incest, though provoked by
Aphrodite out of sheer jealousy, gets the disdain that the society understands
or should. The incestuous relationship between the father and daughter, receives
poetic justice, by Adonis avenging the trauma and pain that her mother
underwent, in causing similar grief in Aphrodite, after his own death.

All in all an interesting Greek myth of
tragic and unfulfilled love and lust.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Victor
Hugo is supposed to have said, “Woman is the most sublime ideal",
and it is this sublimity that we celebrate during the Navratri, the ideal that
a woman is. The principle of Shakti is invoked and the nation worships this
feminine principle which is the driving force behind the world.

According to Devi Mahatmya,
once upon a time, there was a demon, who had threatened the very existence of
the universe. Due to the boons he had received during his numerous penances, he
had become invincible; at least the gods couldn’t do much harm to him. All the
gods got together and breathed their energies into a powerful ball of energy,
which shaped to form the Shakti. This Shakti was responsible in eliminating the
demon, after a waging a powerful war, where the demon took different shapes to
elude the powerful force, but at the end die in her hands. The goddess came to
be known as the Mahisasur-mardini,
the slayer of the buffalo-demon, and the quintessential woman-power.

On earth, we commemorate this
divine act of the goddess and celebrate, Navratri, Durga Puja, etc.

Durga slaying Mahisasura

The principle of Shakti
cannot be undermined, rather, any god without its shakti is meaningless and a
beautiful verse explains this as candid as शक्तिकेबिनाशिवभीशवकेसमानहैं,
i.e. without Shakti, Shiv is like a dead-body. Shakti is the
personification of the divine feminity, the creative powers of the earth. No
god is complete without this principle of Shakti, and together they create a
beautiful harmony of the union of the two principles, the purusha and prakriti,
the union of which is the root of all creation on earth.

Hold
it, I think, I have got a trifle carried away in my explanation of some
concepts which only make good scripts, and just that. Did you like that? If you
did, then let me pat my back, to say that I do write well. Don’t make that face;
humility is not the domain of men! Such behaviour on our part is confidence,
awareness and truth; however, if such behaviour was expressed by a woman, then
they would be over-confidence, arrogance and brazenness! Whoever said, the world was equal, don’t believe her – aren’t there
mountains and valleys on the same surface of the earth?

The
earlier paragraph is a utopia painted with all the colours of the rainbow, and
more. Those words of wisdom were only to make the women folk feel good and
raise them to an altar after treating them like paanv-ki-jooti, for major part of the year and in more than 90% of our
country. These occasional rhetoric of Shakti, etc. served well, to ensure that
the women-folk got back to the grind, the fields, the kitchen and the beds to
cater to all the needs of the man, and the society at large! And just in case a
solitary one, did not, then there were means to bring them back to senses – kangaroo-courts,
Khaps, stoning to death, rape and murder, naked-parade, etc. If nothing, it
served its purpose well in others, who wouldn’t dream of any misdemeanour as
inane as staring eye-to-eye with ones younger brother, leave alone any boy!

What
a manly sense of achievement! First raise them to an altar, and then drag them
to your beds. First talk them into such harmless divinity and them have them
croon whatever you want. First offer them some rituals and then ensure that
they perform ritually for you.

Dear
Indians, let’s get off the high-horse of big talk, and take stalk. Except in a
few homes and an even fewer Corporate, the woman is a second-class citizen, if
one at all. Let’s not resort to such fancy concepts, if we don’t mean it. As a
nation, we have failed our women, when one Nirbhaya takes place in Delhi and
the other follows suit in Mumbai, Badaun, and just about everywhere else. If we
still have to enact laws to catch hold of them legally, then we sure have
failed as a society. If our politicians tell us what women should wear and what
they should not, just to avoid getting raped, then such talk of Shakti is pure
high-decibel talk and that’s it, and if such politicians who suffer from verbal
diarrhoea too often, still move around freely in our society, then let’s take
some blame for allowing the moronic retrogrades to move around freely.

A
society, which feels proud to allow their men to behave like stray dogs and is
not ashamed to ask the women to cover themselves, since the salivating strays cannot
be controlled, then stop worshipping the feminine principle – it’s a sham, if
not shame!

Ma
Durga, my apologies for writing what I wrote, but sorry to tell you, that this
is the truth, sordid but truth. The eulogies die a quiet death, even before you
turn your back and are yourself reduced to left-over’s in rivers and ponds. I
am rather appalled, that you are unable to control the terror that has been
unleashed on your daughters by a certain segment of your own followers,
especially when the victims had faith in you.

Image
Courtesy – Taproot India’s campaign ‘Abused Sisters’

I
dare you to show us that you care for the daughters of this country, and I
further dare you to show the principle of Shakti that I so eloquently waxed, a
few paragraphs back.

About Me

Utkarsh has qualifications in Mythology, both Indian and World from Mumbai University. He is also a faculty on the subject of Comparative Mythology, at the Mumbai University, India. Utkarsh is also a regular trainer and lecturer on varying subjects at private organisations and educational institutions.

Utkarsh has more than 2 decades of experience in Sales and Business Development of IT products and solutions. He has worked with some of the well known IT organisations, some being start-ups, in India. Utkarsh is also a regular trainer and lecturer on varying subjects at private organisations and educational institutions.

Besides his Blog he is also a content provider to a few portals on similar subjects. Some of his short stories have been published in the well known literary story Blog, called LITIZEN. Utkarsh has also written a book on the subject of mythological-fiction, and working on another one, both of which are expected to be published in the next few months.